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I have some vacation coming up on Friday and even though we’re not going anywhere, I’m pretty pumped about a four day week. Due to the nature of my program and the need to schedule vacation 6 months in advance I’ve sprinkled my remaining time off throughout these next few months. A few days here, a few days there of some needed rest and wanderings. Seattle is still so new to us, so I’m using this stay-cation as a great opportunity to explore our new corner of the world.

Picture from our road trip, somewhere in Wyoming. Text from one of my favorite hymns.

(What do you mean, you don’t eat no meat? …That’s okay, that’s okay. I make lamb.) :

And basking in the glow of all the love sent to us from across the US:

Love to the Baileys, Plueses, Symon & Ashley, Watsons, the new Fitzpatricks, Reeses, Moores, and Duffs!

Love to the Pecks, Kirks, Nichols, Vances, Pecks, Finches, Connie, the new Banachowskis, Lanes, the new Balestrinos, Mirs, and the Grohals

So love from the Sarvases on our first Christmas! We hope you and yours have a very merry one!

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine,
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.Love shall be our token,Love shall be yours and love be mine
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

So finals are finally over and I’m finally starting to process the excess amounts of caffeine out of my system. Jeff and I threw a cocktail party for some of my co-residents this past weekend (more on that later maybe), and it motivated us to kick into high gear all the projects we’ve been putting off. Mostly the ones I’ve been putting off. Jeff doesn’t have any projects.

We recently rearranged our bedroom so my desk would fit so I could study in quiet. Turns out Jeff and I don’t study well together – we’re too chatty. Being in this room more made me kind of sad of how bare it was so I decided to do some last minute decorating before our big party (even though people only saw it long enough to throw their coats on the bed).

Before:

(yes, shambles, I know).

After:

Old road map from the Jeep featuring one of my favorite drives between Asheville and Knoxville

Picture from Glacier National Park and a quote, “I like you because you like me and you don’t like very many things” that basically sums up Jeff and I.

Road map of the US highlighting our trip across from NJ to Seattle. Someone asked me what our fascination with yarn and twine was and to be honest, I have no idea..

All in all rounded off with some Shel Silverstein books, some transformer insulators from my aunt, a nice sturdy shelf, and a bridal portrait it makes a nice focal point of the room.

Sorry for the weird lighting in the pictures, I tried to make the fluorescence a little less harsh.

Happy December everyone! Welcome to the month of many of our family birthdays, finals, and Christmas! Time to reflect on what an incredible year 2012 was for us and look forward to what 2013 has in store!

We ushered in this month of joy and celebration with a rainy Saturday night at home, catching up on DVR’d shows, designing our first married Christmas cards and lolling about. Perfection 🙂 To top it off we took the words of Hester Browne literally:

“You should always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge for special occasions. Sometimes the special occasion is that you’ve got a bottle of champagne in the fridge.”

Jeff and I have certainly spent some Christmases together, but this is our first married Christmas so we’re trying out a bunch of fun new things to see if they will become “our” traditions. First on the list: picking out and cutting down a Christmas tree ourselves. Live trees are something we both had when we were younger – before artificial trees looked decent enough and before our parents had lost the extra large amount enthusiasm required to care for a seven foot tall house plant in the midst of an already crazy season. Our family took it even one step further and for a few years had live trees with the roots in a ball at the bottom to replant later on in the yard. Between my little brother’s asthma necessitating less allergens and Jeff’s cats climbing all up in and knocking over his, neither of us has had an actual tree in a decade or two.

But this year we are young and crazy enough to think it’s a great idea.

On Bri’s family’s advice we schlepped up to Paterson’s Lazy Acres Tree Farm in Arlington, WA. I was hoping for snow like their website’s picture, but we settled for a fair amount of rain instead. Bonus points though: they had free cider and a tree bagging service!

We searched through the entire farm for the perfect one. This is not a perfect one. This is what Charlie Brown would pick.

This is a good one!

I told Jeff it didn’t count unless we chopped it down ourselves

Tree successfully procured!

After we got it home it was time to decorate! New tradition #2: Trimming the tree with a bottle of champagne!

We tried to watch Elf, but kept getting too distracted to pay enough deserved attention to it. So we settled for the Duke game (76-71 over Louisville!) and a This American Life recording with David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries about when he worked as an elf at Macy’s.

We went with a silver, green and blue theme. Also included are all the glass ornaments my parents have given me since I was little.

As we collect ornaments ourselves it’ll get prettier – but not bad for some first timers!

To round out our nascent Christmas decoration collection I painted some canvases to hang in the hallway: